Thursday, September 20, 2012

Wild Horse, Wild Ride (Screen Media Films, PG)

Every year, the Bureau of Land Management removes thousands of mustangs, feral descendants of the domesticated horses imported by the Spanish conquistadors, from public lands in the United States. It’s a controversial program, but not the central subject of Wild Horse, Wild Ride; instead, the film focuses on a program to encourage more people to adopt some of these horses. That program is the Extreme Mustang Makeover Challenge, which sounds like a cheesy reality show but is actually a program in which 100 people each are assigned one of the mustangs, which they then try to tame over a three-month period. The culmination of the program is a competition in Fort Worth, Texas, after which time the horses will be offered at auction. Although the Fort Worth competition provides the narrative spine of this documentary, Directors Alex Dawson and Greg Gricus are at least as interested in the process as the goal, and in the lives of the trainers as in the progress of the horses...more

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